


Mímisbrunnr's Edda

by onewithroses



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Norse Mythology, The Avengers (2012), Thor - All Media Types
Genre: 5 Things, Alternate Reality, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Metaphors, Mythology - Freeform, Prose Poem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-26
Updated: 2013-02-26
Packaged: 2017-12-03 16:42:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/700453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onewithroses/pseuds/onewithroses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Loki knows it is all a dream. Most days it is through the void and back again. One hundred days and one hundred happenings--all possibilities that come with a breath and a gasp.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mímisbrunnr's Edda

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chaperoned](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaperoned/gifts).



Loki learned once (from a teacher) (from a father) (from a friend) that some moments determine the fabric of the universe. They tie the world and everyone in it.

They tell everyone how it will end. They tell everyone where they will go from there.

Loki thinks it is (isn't) hogwash.

|.1

Loki doesn't so much land as is caught--pulled from his descent by a net he doesn't recognize by people he doesn't know. They are purple, he thinks, or maybe dark, dark dark.

It's hard to tell what (is up) (is down) (has happened) (is happening) but he knows the tip of the blade that he thinks pierces his skin is (wrong) (not real) (imaginary) (hurts. hurts. hurts). It is a nowhere place and time passes (is passing) (has passed) (will pass) slow. Slow enough that when his eyes flicker open to stare up and spit at his captors he thinks his voice is gone because of snake venom and that some day (soon) (never) (yesterday) Sigyn will be there to take it away--to take everything away (and nothing. Nothing because traitors get nothing).

Loki feels the dreams pass (begin) (end) (stay) feverish with the need (hate) (want) (despair) to do anything (nothing) to end them.

A heart is a small price to pay for peace. His eyes promise this, heated blue in servitude.

|.2

There is no landing. No peace. Loki feels the roots of Yggdrasil dig deep into his ribs, pull at his heart, and drain him away. He hangs there still, staring up at Mimir's well. He thinks he (wants) (hopes) (hates) the way Odin looks back.

|.3

Loki lands on Midgard, spitting up blood and bile in a smoking crater along the northern hemisphere. The stars are (starring) (judging) (quiet) above him, and he stays until he can't anymore.

A prince was never made to crawl--but he crawls anyway--pushing burnt dirt behind him like a varmint (he is a varmint (a traitor) (a victor) (a prince)).

Somewhere a little girl dressed in a blue jacket leans over the rim of a crater. She stares, tilts her head, and asks: _are you a fallen star, Mister?_

Loki laughs and slides back down to the center of the hole, dirt smearing across his cheeks that have turned blue, blue blue.

||.1

Somewhere Loki is stealing the tesseract.

A black hole in a warehouse turned laboratory and he feels the floor connect with his knees. He stares, watching the gray tremble into color, and then rises--smiling. There's a bubble of victory and dark humor over the thrum of _exhaustion. Pain. Pain. Tired_. The smile fades.

Here, Loki has a job to do and he knows it as well as anyone else in the room. A Midgardian man--black with a black eye-patch, "Sir, please put down the spear."

He doesn’t recognize him, but he is of no consequence. What's more is the spear in question. Elegant metal and curved. Loki looks to it and (recognizes) (doesn't) (forgets) (remembers) points it at the Midgardian.

It is not of Asgardian make as it is full of tricks they always disparaged him for.

Two Midgardians go down together and metal smacks him across the chest, bouncing. Useless. Trinkets. The action is infuriating.

Like they could ever hurt him--Loki of Asgard (Loki Laufeyson)

He has a job to do (what is it?) and a tesseract to steal.

And in a matter of minutes he's stealing lives and hearts as well.

Midgardians were always so easy to control.

Inside Loki knows (is sure) it’s because they like it.

||.2

At the same time Loki is watching the tesseract swell with the rage of his brother knock-knock-knocking.

The human man beside him (the same man, Loki recognizes him) turns away from Loki's careful eye to the scientist nearby, "Is there anything we know for certain?"

Selvig. His name is Selvig and Loki knows he knows nothing. Ignorant human playing at magic, calling it science. "The tesseract is misbehaving."

The man turns to him(Loki)(Liesmith)(Traitor), "Do you know what's happening?"

"Of course." The words leak out of his mouth with only a hint of a smirk. They curl onto his disobedient tongue as the cube in front of them pulses and shatters outward with a whirl of black and blue that blinds everyone but him. "My brother is asking to be let in."

No one asks who his brother is.

It’s impossible not to remember a ruined desert town and the name Thor Odinson.

|||.1

Loki is stealing a Midgardian's eye. Slick suited he slams the man onto a table and pulls it from his eye. He struggles. Loki can feel the body beneath him--warm and so, so weak. His mother might have told him that _strength_ is not what he thinks it is.

And strength is the strangest thing--something he will never (understand) (covet) (reject).

He leans over the body and peers up, smiling at the way Midgardians scream, fleeing. The eye he’s taken faces elsewhere--a Midgardian parody of Mirmir's well and his own father's ever-seeing eye and empty socket.

Odin has always been as empty as his eyes--because without one he is missing a part of his soul.

|||.2

He is in a nowhere place that is more of a dream than reality. This Loki barely remembers when he leaves but when he it is so (real) (unreal) (maddening).

He sits at a table with his brother beside him, and beside Thor there is a woman who has red-red hair and who speaks nothing but Russian. Loki knows this and more because this is a place he lives. He lives here. His brother, too, with no sideways glances or doubtful looks.

And his hands are blue-blue-blue.

“Хожу-брожу, матрешку держу,” The woman says, walking a circle around his back. _I go back and forth, holding a Russian nested doll_. He watches her with his eyes closed. She puts a blue doll in his hand--two small, too solid to open. “Разберу напополам -” She says, “детям в руки дам.”

( _I split it in two parts. And put them into the children's hands._ )

She leaves that day with a man who is more metal than flesh. He whispers in Russian to her, too low for Loki to catch it.

Loki watches, his breath crackling like frost. Here, Thor never says _brother_ or even _monster_. Here, he holds a nesting doll and wonders if he will find someone else holding the matching one.

He won’t.

It (is not) (cannot) (will not) be real.

It is a fever dream.

|||.3

It's cold and Loki doesn't know where he is. He only knows his name because that's all he owns--that and a ratty sweatshirt which he pulls over his head as he dashes down an alleyway. His shoes are soaked through with dirty water that used to be snow and his nose runs. Somewhere his brother is looking for him, Loki knows, but he can't decide if he's happy for that or not.

He decides not as he stares into a camera stamped on the side of a building and turns to run again.

He's adopted. He's adopted. He's adopted.

And he doesn't know what that means.

|V.1

The Midgardian's bow to him. Like slaves they topple with not even one standing to look his mirrored images in the eye. Loki is right, and left, and straight, and the Midgardian’s bow like a row of toppled books--crying like sheep.

And he was always right to do this. Always right to take them under a firm hand.

Because they wanted it, truly--needed it even if they did not know it.

|V.2

A jackass in a red tin can blows up a statue of a horse outside of the Opera. The stone flies out in shards and cuts into the faces of those nearby causing them to run, trampling each other, and fall gasping to the ground.

"Kneel," he says. It does not sound like the statement of a madman. The voice is steady, unperturbed--firm. This is someone who is used to being followed. Loki knows because it is the way his father sounds, his brother sounds, his mother sounds.

Loki is (weak) (pale) ( _human_ ) and he stares up at the man in the suit with as much disdain as possible. His cheek oozes weakly and he says, _no_.

He is not so surprised when he is lifted into the air--so high, further than he ever wants to be. Loki was afraid of airplanes and storms and never, ever, flew.

He wonders if that was a mistake now because the faceplate moved to show another man with wide brown eyes, cheeks beaded with sweat. "You don't get to say no."

When the man lets him go, releases him to fall, fall, fall through the sky to the stone below he thinks _I should have gone with Thor to Nevada this weekend._

|V.3

The horse under him is slick with sweat. Its heat thrums up into his armor and causes him to sweat uncomfortably. Before him, Loki sees Asgardians. Behind him he knows are his countrymen--giants who tower over him like buildings but who are no stronger than him because he is graced with magic.

The ice they brought with them here has melted--but that is something that was expected.

"You will come back." Behind him his brother speaks, his words a small earthquake. "Tell us how to enter without being seen."

This is a trade dressed as diplomacy. It is a trick hidden where one is expected.

Loki is asked to do something he (has done) (has never done) (will always do). It is a contract with his blood which he (hates) (loves) (battles) (surrenders).

"Of course, brother." The brother behind him is ice and snow. The man before him is thunder and lightening. Loki does not say he thinks he will melt in the heat of Asgard and burn under this man's lightning.

V.1

Loki isn't offered a drink. Instead he falls out of the skin and through Tony's window (and he's Tony this time, Tony). The glass has cut him through the side, but it doesn't hurt, not really. He's just not able to stand.

And Tony's ceiling is boring.

"Just--hold on. Hold on." Tony does not sound upset. Not really. Perhaps his tone is laced with concern. It's something Loki feels like he could taste if he were anywhere else except in the rubble that was Tony's lounge.

The vodka burns cold as it hits his skin and Loki cries out--reaching to grab onto something, anything.

He grabs Tony's hair and pulls, a curse on his lips, "I (hate you) (love you) (sorry) (sorry) (sorry)."

"Shut it and bite down on this." Loki is pretty sure Tony just shoved a thin cutting board in his mouth and he grunts, spitting it out as he prods the glass just below his rib cage. "Pepper is going to kill us both, you know? No dying, she said. To both of us."

“Remind her I made no promises.” Loki wants to vomit, listens to the sound of thunder in the distance. “And remember you promised me a drink.”

V.2

"Milk." It is a single word with a thousand possibilities. The milk could rot in its container, sour into yogurt or be processed into cheese. It could be drunk--dribble down his throat and out the corner of his mouth. It could shatter like glass on the tiles.

Tony stares at him, blank faced. "You want milk."

"Did you or did you not ask me if I wanted a drink?" Loki's mind is like a freight train--it runs and runs and runs and now it is colliding with everything that shouldn't be true.

Tony walks back to his refrigerator, opens it, and pulls out a carton of milk. He pulls off the top, sniff it, and shrugs. "You sure you don't want anything else?"

Loki doesn't look at him. A moment later he takes the glass and throws it at the wall--watching it shatter and splatter across the gray-black tiles. He is (here) (not) and this feels like a dream.

V.3

It's not his home, but Loki slides around the bar as the man in the red suit watches him--face exposed while the rest of his body isn't. "Tony Stark--would you like a drink?"

"Out of my own bar?" The man smiles, but the humor doesn't reach his eyes. Loki notices and keeps the distance between them--careful, calculating. Tony does the same, though he divests himself of his armor--metal arms coming from the floor to pluck it off of him piece by piece. "Makes the offer lose something, don’t you think?"

"Perhaps so." Loki clicks his tongue between his teeth, feeling vulnerable here now--powerless. How dare Odin take them--keep them. This is not a battle that can easily be won when all around him he can hear the hiss- _click_ of a hundred human toys engaging and disengaging. "But I thought Midgardians liked drinks."

"Oh, we do." Tony smiled again, ruthless and bitter. "But only once we've won--Jarvis?"

Metal hands come out from what Loki thought was a drawer and drip into his middle.

The Midgardian walks around the bar, slowly, and leans over him. "At least you didn't appeal to my humanity."

Loki frowns back up at him, legs bowed like a dolls against the tile, "At least you weren't listening for my brother."

 

  


The world comes through in waves. Like water it is sometimes clear and sometimes it is so unbearably murky that Loki isn't sure where his body begins and it ends.

It does not matter.

Somedays, Loki remembers that Mirmir’s well is before him (behind him) and his body is nothing but an object riddled with decay. Sometimes he knows it is all a dream. Most days it is through the void and back again. One hundred days and one hundred happenings--all possibilities that come with a breath and a gasp. These were the things hidden in the singing darkness, the creeping frost that tangles and drags his skin through the Ginnungagap and the roots of Yggdrasil, the life tree.

All this and more.

Loki breathes it, feels it rip tight across the skin of his arm (white) (blue) (white) (blue) (red) and wonders which is true. He will always tell the lie hidden in the truth.

He ancient and young and _cursed_ and all the (better) (worse) (destroyed) for it.

He begins where he ends and it starts again.

**Author's Note:**

> For Christmas Chaperoned asked for "frostiron: groundhogs day". 
> 
> This does not fit the requirements and may seem emotionally abusive by comparison.


End file.
